10 ms·

Could British invention foil terror bombs?

21 points by merah 10y ago

Totoradio 10y ago
I don't know if this device works, but this is just wrong: >"I'm sorry to say, but the Brussels attack, this would have instantly sorted out the terrorists before they came into the terminal, and similarly the concert in Paris," he says. "If it had been on the doors there, it would have stopped people getting in." The terrorists who attacked the Bataclan didn't arrive as simple concert goers, they had AK-47s and shot their way in.
- toyg 10y ago
  You don't understand. My rock repels tigers; hence, presence of tigers must be due to the absence of my rock. Did I mention that my rock is on sale?
  - sametmax 10y ago
    And once you buy the rock: the rock also repels dragons. Do you see any dragons ? That's because you bought the rock !
- mseebach 10y ago
  An effective deployment of the device would probably involve a sort of sluice gate setup, that will detect traffic through an outer perimeter and, when triggered, seals an inner perimeter. The distance between the two is designed to be greater than that which can be covered on foot in the time the device takes to make a detection. That, of course, ignores a central lesson of the Brussels attacks: They happened before security. This device might make it reasonably hard to get explosives into an airport building and concerts halls (because thousands theatres like the Bataclan are totally going to invest millions in these devices and the necessary physical reconstruction), but there are plenty of other buildings where large numbers of people congregate, including busy streets that will be impossible to protect like this. Also, having a mechanism to seal your targets inside during an attack is totally never going to be abused by the bad guys (and if you evacuate on a trigger, you just need a few guys with AKs outside the exits). That said, I'm sure there are good applications for an effective non-intrusive explosives detector (eg in making airport security smoother) -- these attacks just ain't it.
  - junto 10y ago
    This is exactly the key point. You either have a queue of people inside the airport, or outside waiting to go through security. The target has just been moved and is equally as accessible (perhaps more so) as before.
    - mseebach 10y ago
      The point is that you could deploy this device without having a queue, just a door to slam in the face of a positive detection. Worst case, you need to space people out a bit.
      - junto 10y ago
        Wherever you have a funnel, you get a queue. You have people standing outside waiting for the bus, smoking a cigarette. People gather and there is nothing that you can do about it.
        mseebach 10y ago
        Then don't have a funnel, or have enough of them. I've never queued, except for maybe the briefest of moments, to enter an airport building, even though you always have to pass through a "funnel" (aka draft-preventing double doors[1]). Even the narrow automatic one-way sluice doors[2] increasingly popular as you leave the secure area of an airport only ever seem to cause a queue when some idiot tries to go back, and security has to reset them. When there's a queue at security/immigration it's because the checkpoint is understaffed (or otherwise under-provisioned), not because there's a checkpoint. 1: http://cdn.kone.com/www.kone.co.uk/Images/49562_Entrance_double_sliding_door_korj_565x175_565x175.jpg?v=1 http://cdn.kone.com/www.kone.co.uk/Images/49562_Entrance_dou... 2: http://www.recorduk.co.uk/images/getImage?t=product&img=image_overview&id=5 http://www.recorduk.co.uk/images/getImage?t=product&img=imag...
        GordonS 10y ago
        > I've never queued, except for maybe the briefest of moments, to enter an airport building Probably because most airports don't have security before entering. For those that do, there are indeed large queues outside. Mumbai airport is one such example.
- monk_e_boy 10y ago
  This is a device to make money. All they need is for it to be installed in ONE airport and then they can say "Hey, look. They've got it installed because they are anti-terror. Look at you. You don't have one. You know what that looks like to all of us? Yeah, you are pro-terror. To be anti-terror you need this device." Any politician who gets one of these installed using government anti-terror funds! Sweeeet! They can strut around telling everyone how much money they are spending to foil terrorists and ACTUALLY HAVE A BOX THEY CAN POINT AT. <press release/photo shoot>
sametmax 10y ago
I find crazy the amount of resources we deploy to fight something: - that causes little deaths compared to most diseases or social issues. - cost little compared to most economical or educational issues. - has little long term consequences on the country compared to internal and external policies, laws, politics and visions; - is a direct consequence of social, economical and educational issues and a by product of policies, laws, politics and visions. But what's astonishing me the most is the fact that a lot of people don't see this and just freak out, despite that almost all of them have never been in direct contact with it or suffer direct consequences from it.
- ross-life 10y ago
  Because (it feels) like it's not possible to properly debate the subject in public. As a little/normal person the answer is always the same: "But but what if it was your mother/girlfriend/daughter that died in the attack?!". These are the same people that probably have been into contact with someone who has directly dealt with the consequences of police corruption, yet won't ever support "making the police's job harder". Once an attack "gets through", which will always happen eventually, anyone that didn't support the PersonalRights-Devouring Anti-Terrorist Bill will get crucified by the press and their opponents. Most people don't appear to care about numbers, or facts or evidence. They only seem to care about pushing their ideology (normally authoritarianism) that "makes them feel safe", rights and freedoms be damned (which is why I can never take the US's obsession with "rights and freedoms" seriously).
  - sametmax 10y ago
    Yes but why do we fail to convince ? What can we do to help people not panicking ?
    - nxzero 10y ago
      You can't, let it go.
    - marcoperaza 10y ago
      If panic is to be averted, the leadership of the West has to show that they take the problem seriously. As long as people are tiptoeing around even calling the problem what it is, hard-line sentiment will grow. Tony Blair had some good thoughts on this lately: ""The centre has become flabby and unwilling to take people on. We concede far too much. There's this idea that you're part of an elite if you think in terms of respectful tolerance towards other people. It's ridiculous [...] You have to give a real solution and not one which is populist but false. If you don't give a solution, and you leave people with a choice between what I would call a bit of flabby liberalism and the hardline, they'll take the hardline I'm afraid." Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/education-35862598 http://www.bbc.com/news/education-35862598
peterclary 10y ago
"First, a microscopic amount of Semtex 1A high explosive is dabbed onto a T-shirt. To the naked eye, it is almost invisible - but from a large, red, metal box mounted on a portable steel trolley an ultra-violet laser beam flickers on to the white cotton surface of the garment. Immediately, a warning flashes up on the display monitor." So you would be able to cause disruption AND get innocents locked up by simply covertly dabbing innocents in a crowd.
- sametmax 10y ago
  And by spraying markers on a lot of people you can either: - cost a lot of money by forcing events to be cancelled; - enforce more invasive/costly security measures; - diminush the value of the security mesure and pass a bomb in. But this is what's strange with terrorists : they strike ma as utterly incompetents. There is so many easy ways to fuck things up, and they always do the ineficient and hard things. My father worked as a head of security for a national company, we used to discuss of all the way you can really hurt companies, people and society. It's not even that hard and costly. Are they lacking of imagination, or not really trying ?
  - golergka 10y ago
    I don't think that intelligence is in any way correlated to having worldviews of most of modern terrorists. Just compare their methods to Unabomber, for example.
  - noir_lord 10y ago
    I made this argument years ago, if you want to weaken a population and cause maximum disruption go after infrastructure, a lot of it isn't guarded by more than a chainlink fence and is out in the middle of nowhere (electrical sub-stations been a good example). Modern society is incredibly dependent on lots of complex systems with moving parts all functioning at high capacity, it wouldn't take a lot to get things wobbling.
  - reacweb 10y ago
    I think, this is one part of the terror: they show how they can hurt while using inefficient techniques (craft knives for the 9/11).
yoo1I 10y ago
No. Now to read the article.
- yoo1I 10y ago
  > "If it had been on the doors there, it would have stopped people getting in." Problem? People blowing themselves up on airplanes. Solution: Check them for bombs before they board the airplane. Next Problem? People blowing themselves up in the lines before the bomb check in the airport. Solution: Check people outside the airport. Next Problem? People blowing themselves up in the lines outside the airport Solution: Check people for bombs before they board the trains for the airport. Next Problem? ... s/[airplanes|airports|trains]/<crowded place>/g Apparent Actual Problem? Crowds of people are hard to protect without making the crowds live's very uncomfortable. Actual problem? People want to blow themselves up in crows of people. Solution: Spend more effort making the world a place in which people do not like blowing themselves up anymore and/or in which they are too lazy to be motivated to do it. Plan?
  - gmac 10y ago
    Plan? First, get news media to lift their embargo on trying to understand the motivations of people who perpetrate these awful attacks. Right now, it seems the only acceptable explanation is comic-book evil plus religious prejudice ("they hate our freedoms!"). This is basically a taboo on the application of reason, and we'll get nowhere until it goes away. Second, reflect a little on the possible motivations of these people. Third, I suspect, attempt to persuade Western governments to stop (or significantly scale back) blowing people up, murdering them without trial, etc, in other parts of the world. Best estimates for the body count in Iraq, for example, are in the many hundreds of thousands, and many of those cannot be combatants. I absolutely condemn terrorism, but if I were a terrorist, I'm pretty sure this would be my motivation.
    - GordonS 10y ago
      The majority of those killed in Iraq were civilians[1] And that's just Iraq - there is also Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria[2], Somalia... [1] https://www.iraqbodycount.org https://www.iraqbodycount.org [2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/03/us-led-air-strikes-on-isis-targets-killed-more-than-450-civilians-report http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/03/us-led-air-stri...
rwmj 10y ago
People who work in the mining industry are going to be in for a "fun" time.
petra 10y ago
1. How hard is to create a process to fully clean terrorists and their equipment from residue ? 2. Is it possible to create a way to make many people catch this residue ?
rbcgerard 10y ago
If this were to be deployed, I wonder what the comparison between the number of people that would be killed, assaulted, strip searched, scared, delayed etc. by false positives vs. terrorism

21 points by merah 10y ago

I don't know if this device works, but this is just wrong: >"I'm sorry to say, but the Brussels attack, this would have instantly sorted out the terrorists before they came into the terminal, and similarly the concert in Paris," he says. "If it had been on the doors there, it would have stopped people getting in." The terrorists who attacked the Bataclan didn't arrive as simple concert goers, they had AK-47s and shot their way in.

toyg 10y ago
You don't understand. My rock repels tigers; hence, presence of tigers must be due to the absence of my rock. Did I mention that my rock is on sale?
- sametmax 10y ago
  And once you buy the rock: the rock also repels dragons. Do you see any dragons ? That's because you bought the rock !
mseebach 10y ago
An effective deployment of the device would probably involve a sort of sluice gate setup, that will detect traffic through an outer perimeter and, when triggered, seals an inner perimeter. The distance between the two is designed to be greater than that which can be covered on foot in the time the device takes to make a detection. That, of course, ignores a central lesson of the Brussels attacks: They happened before security. This device might make it reasonably hard to get explosives into an airport building and concerts halls (because thousands theatres like the Bataclan are totally going to invest millions in these devices and the necessary physical reconstruction), but there are plenty of other buildings where large numbers of people congregate, including busy streets that will be impossible to protect like this. Also, having a mechanism to seal your targets inside during an attack is totally never going to be abused by the bad guys (and if you evacuate on a trigger, you just need a few guys with AKs outside the exits). That said, I'm sure there are good applications for an effective non-intrusive explosives detector (eg in making airport security smoother) -- these attacks just ain't it.
- junto 10y ago
  This is exactly the key point. You either have a queue of people inside the airport, or outside waiting to go through security. The target has just been moved and is equally as accessible (perhaps more so) as before.
  - mseebach 10y ago
    The point is that you could deploy this device without having a queue, just a door to slam in the face of a positive detection. Worst case, you need to space people out a bit.
    - junto 10y ago
      Wherever you have a funnel, you get a queue. You have people standing outside waiting for the bus, smoking a cigarette. People gather and there is nothing that you can do about it.
      - mseebach 10y ago
        Then don't have a funnel, or have enough of them. I've never queued, except for maybe the briefest of moments, to enter an airport building, even though you always have to pass through a "funnel" (aka draft-preventing double doors[1]). Even the narrow automatic one-way sluice doors[2] increasingly popular as you leave the secure area of an airport only ever seem to cause a queue when some idiot tries to go back, and security has to reset them. When there's a queue at security/immigration it's because the checkpoint is understaffed (or otherwise under-provisioned), not because there's a checkpoint. 1: http://cdn.kone.com/www.kone.co.uk/Images/49562_Entrance_double_sliding_door_korj_565x175_565x175.jpg?v=1 http://cdn.kone.com/www.kone.co.uk/Images/49562_Entrance_dou... 2: http://www.recorduk.co.uk/images/getImage?t=product&img=image_overview&id=5 http://www.recorduk.co.uk/images/getImage?t=product&img=imag...
        GordonS 10y ago
        > I've never queued, except for maybe the briefest of moments, to enter an airport building Probably because most airports don't have security before entering. For those that do, there are indeed large queues outside. Mumbai airport is one such example.
monk_e_boy 10y ago
This is a device to make money. All they need is for it to be installed in ONE airport and then they can say "Hey, look. They've got it installed because they are anti-terror. Look at you. You don't have one. You know what that looks like to all of us? Yeah, you are pro-terror. To be anti-terror you need this device." Any politician who gets one of these installed using government anti-terror funds! Sweeeet! They can strut around telling everyone how much money they are spending to foil terrorists and ACTUALLY HAVE A BOX THEY CAN POINT AT. <press release/photo shoot>

sametmax 10y ago

I find crazy the amount of resources we deploy to fight something: - that causes little deaths compared to most diseases or social issues. - cost little compared to most economical or educational issues. - has little long term consequences on the country compared to internal and external policies, laws, politics and visions; - is a direct consequence of social, economical and educational issues and a by product of policies, laws, politics and visions. But what's astonishing me the most is the fact that a lot of people don't see this and just freak out, despite that almost all of them have never been in direct contact with it or suffer direct consequences from it.

ross-life 10y ago
Because (it feels) like it's not possible to properly debate the subject in public. As a little/normal person the answer is always the same: "But but what if it was your mother/girlfriend/daughter that died in the attack?!". These are the same people that probably have been into contact with someone who has directly dealt with the consequences of police corruption, yet won't ever support "making the police's job harder". Once an attack "gets through", which will always happen eventually, anyone that didn't support the PersonalRights-Devouring Anti-Terrorist Bill will get crucified by the press and their opponents. Most people don't appear to care about numbers, or facts or evidence. They only seem to care about pushing their ideology (normally authoritarianism) that "makes them feel safe", rights and freedoms be damned (which is why I can never take the US's obsession with "rights and freedoms" seriously).
- sametmax 10y ago
  Yes but why do we fail to convince ? What can we do to help people not panicking ?
  - nxzero 10y ago
    You can't, let it go.
  - marcoperaza 10y ago
    If panic is to be averted, the leadership of the West has to show that they take the problem seriously. As long as people are tiptoeing around even calling the problem what it is, hard-line sentiment will grow. Tony Blair had some good thoughts on this lately: ""The centre has become flabby and unwilling to take people on. We concede far too much. There's this idea that you're part of an elite if you think in terms of respectful tolerance towards other people. It's ridiculous [...] You have to give a real solution and not one which is populist but false. If you don't give a solution, and you leave people with a choice between what I would call a bit of flabby liberalism and the hardline, they'll take the hardline I'm afraid." Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/education-35862598 http://www.bbc.com/news/education-35862598

peterclary 10y ago

"First, a microscopic amount of Semtex 1A high explosive is dabbed onto a T-shirt. To the naked eye, it is almost invisible - but from a large, red, metal box mounted on a portable steel trolley an ultra-violet laser beam flickers on to the white cotton surface of the garment. Immediately, a warning flashes up on the display monitor." So you would be able to cause disruption AND get innocents locked up by simply covertly dabbing innocents in a crowd.

sametmax 10y ago
And by spraying markers on a lot of people you can either: - cost a lot of money by forcing events to be cancelled; - enforce more invasive/costly security measures; - diminush the value of the security mesure and pass a bomb in. But this is what's strange with terrorists : they strike ma as utterly incompetents. There is so many easy ways to fuck things up, and they always do the ineficient and hard things. My father worked as a head of security for a national company, we used to discuss of all the way you can really hurt companies, people and society. It's not even that hard and costly. Are they lacking of imagination, or not really trying ?
- golergka 10y ago
  I don't think that intelligence is in any way correlated to having worldviews of most of modern terrorists. Just compare their methods to Unabomber, for example.
- noir_lord 10y ago
  I made this argument years ago, if you want to weaken a population and cause maximum disruption go after infrastructure, a lot of it isn't guarded by more than a chainlink fence and is out in the middle of nowhere (electrical sub-stations been a good example). Modern society is incredibly dependent on lots of complex systems with moving parts all functioning at high capacity, it wouldn't take a lot to get things wobbling.
- reacweb 10y ago
  I think, this is one part of the terror: they show how they can hurt while using inefficient techniques (craft knives for the 9/11).

yoo1I 10y ago

No. Now to read the article.

yoo1I 10y ago
> "If it had been on the doors there, it would have stopped people getting in." Problem? People blowing themselves up on airplanes. Solution: Check them for bombs before they board the airplane. Next Problem? People blowing themselves up in the lines before the bomb check in the airport. Solution: Check people outside the airport. Next Problem? People blowing themselves up in the lines outside the airport Solution: Check people for bombs before they board the trains for the airport. Next Problem? ... s/[airplanes|airports|trains]/<crowded place>/g Apparent Actual Problem? Crowds of people are hard to protect without making the crowds live's very uncomfortable. Actual problem? People want to blow themselves up in crows of people. Solution: Spend more effort making the world a place in which people do not like blowing themselves up anymore and/or in which they are too lazy to be motivated to do it. Plan?
- gmac 10y ago
  Plan? First, get news media to lift their embargo on trying to understand the motivations of people who perpetrate these awful attacks. Right now, it seems the only acceptable explanation is comic-book evil plus religious prejudice ("they hate our freedoms!"). This is basically a taboo on the application of reason, and we'll get nowhere until it goes away. Second, reflect a little on the possible motivations of these people. Third, I suspect, attempt to persuade Western governments to stop (or significantly scale back) blowing people up, murdering them without trial, etc, in other parts of the world. Best estimates for the body count in Iraq, for example, are in the many hundreds of thousands, and many of those cannot be combatants. I absolutely condemn terrorism, but if I were a terrorist, I'm pretty sure this would be my motivation.
  - GordonS 10y ago
    The majority of those killed in Iraq were civilians[1] And that's just Iraq - there is also Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria[2], Somalia... [1] https://www.iraqbodycount.org https://www.iraqbodycount.org [2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/03/us-led-air-strikes-on-isis-targets-killed-more-than-450-civilians-report http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/03/us-led-air-stri...

rwmj 10y ago

People who work in the mining industry are going to be in for a "fun" time.

petra 10y ago

1. How hard is to create a process to fully clean terrorists and their equipment from residue ? 2. Is it possible to create a way to make many people catch this residue ?

rbcgerard 10y ago

If this were to be deployed, I wonder what the comparison between the number of people that would be killed, assaulted, strip searched, scared, delayed etc. by false positives vs. terrorism